W. H. Auden, Musée des Beaux Arts

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Musée des Beaux Arts

, based on Pieter Brueghel's painting,

The Fall of Icarus

, which hangs in the art gallery of that name in Brussels, was written in December1938 and first published in

New Writing

, Spring 1939, the same year in which Auden had published his “In Memory of WB Yeats” with its sobering lines:

....Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry. Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still, For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives In the valley of its saying…

....Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry. Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still, For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives In the valley of its saying…

The socialist hopes for a better world in the 1920s and 30s had manifestly collapsed with the Munich agreement on September 30th 1938, the defeat of the

1380 words

Citation: Early, Patrick. "Musée des Beaux Arts". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 11 April 2006 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=16889, accessed 19 March 2024.]

16889 Musée des Beaux Arts 3 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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